A one-man off-Broadway play arrived in New York last week, interspersing …

Despite the Jobs-style setting (spartan) and attire (black shirt) seen in publicity shots for his one-man show, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, Mike Daisey is not himself playing the role of Steve Jobs. Instead, Daisey relays two tales: one about his own trip to the factories where many of Apple’s products are assembled, and another about Steve Jobs’ ascendancy in the tech world. Before him are some notes torn from a legal pad, a glass of water, and a cloth to mop his brow, which he folds and unfolds neatly as he moves from section to section.

Early on in the show, Daisey identifies himself as an Apple devotee, though one who has, “like many of you, indulge[d] in the Linux heresy” and also had a long-term affair with Microsoft in the 1990s.

Daisey alternates between talking about Steve Jobs’ professional life—well known to anyone who may have read a eulogy or seven in the days following Jobs' passing—and his own trip to Shenzhen, China. He describes the factory city as “the place where almost all of your shit comes from.” While there, he spoke to both employees and businessmen at the factories where each Apple product is created by the hands of thousands of Chinese workers.

The interspersed bits on Jobs’ life don’t constitute new information—Daisey relays the early days of the Macintosh, the Lisa, the falling out with John Sculley, and Jobs’ ouster from the company. The content of this abridged bio isn't that interesting, but Daisey’s fresh, sardonic take on it is.

His story of Shenzhen, on the other hand, has a different tone. With the help of his interpreter and some subterfuge, Daisey spoke to workers at the factories, some members of a secret union, and executives in charge of the factories. I don’t want to give too much away about this section of the story. I will say, though, that I have a passing familiarity with how the sausage is made in Shenzhen and I found these parts of the performance much more riveting than the biographical sections. Daisey dispenses more concrete revelations on the subject of factories in Shenzhen than do most magazine articles, simply because he did not elect to take the guided tour.

The show is funny above all else—Daisey insightfully mocks himself and others who blindly crave whatever marvel of industrial design Apple has just released. He calls Jobs “the master of the forced upgrade. Just when you think all the systems you own can speak to each other, he fucks you.”

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs has been making the rounds for some months now, but the show will no doubt see increased interest since Jobs’ death. Daisey has added a vignette to the end of the show addressing what is now Steve Jobs’ final chapter, one that is amazingly meta and will leave you craving more details. It's a bit of appropriate restraint, though; the moment is reverent and a bit sentimental, and Steve Jobs famously is neither.

Daisey's performance isn’t a lecture—at least, not until the end—but an acknowledgement that our love of iProducts should be accompanied by a healthy dose of realism. Presumably, no one believes their iPhones are molded lovingly out of sunshine and rainbows by the hands of elves working at a casual pace, but most don’t have the full measure of how bad things can be in Shenzhen. Daisey makes an excellent point about his fellow technophiles: “we begin to believe that the edges of the Web are the edges of reality itself,” creating a blind spot about the real-world locations behind all those gadgets that make the Web possible.

It's a show well worth seeing. But if you do go, for the love of Jobs please silence your iPhone first.